You should never judge a book by its cover, but should you judge a story by its title? If the recent success of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is anything to go by, then for many readers today the answer is yes. Seth Grahame-Smith's bestselling mash-up of Jane Austen and George A Romero became one of the most pre-ordered titles this side of The Lost Symbol, based solely on a zeitgeist-surfing title. And if those readers came to the story expecting an obvious joke stretched thin over 316 pages too many, they were not disappointed.

But the best titles do much more than persuade readers to shell out £7.99 for a paperback. Beyond grabbing a reader's attention, a great title should open up the meaning of a story, revealing layers of character, theme and subtext beyond the simple plot. And for a work of speculative fiction the challenge is even greater, as the title should give a taste of the wonder and weirdness the reader can expect from the story to come.

The Nine Billion Names of God by Arthur C Clarke – a story of religion colliding with science written in the early 1950s – is certainly an early contender for Best Ever SF Title. From around the same era, The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester is still at least partially fascinating. And two classics of dystopian fiction, George Orwell's 1984 and Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, take not-dissimilar paths to titular greatness.

But for my money the single greatest era of SF story titling came in the 1960s and early 1970s, when speculative fiction reflected on the political and social changes of the era and became ever weirder and more challenging. The Left Hand of Darkness perfectly encapsulates the feminist arguments of Ursula Le Guin's masterpiece. Just a tad further to the right on the political spectrum, Robert A Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and Stranger in Strange Land nonetheless made their conservative author a key figure of the counterculture. Perhaps my personal favourite of the era comes from no less than Harlan Ellison, whose I Have No Voice, and I Must Scream is every bit as brutal and nasty a story as you might expect. (Although nowhere near as nasty as The Atrocity Exhibition by JG Ballard.)

However, if any single author cornered the market on great titles it was the supremely strange Philip K Dick. The Exit Door Leads In, We Can Remember It For You Wholesale, The Penultimate Truth, A Scanner Darkly, The Man in the High Castle and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? are only a few of the classic titles that Dick penned in his prolific career.